Daily budget meetings, records requests, interviewing students around campus, seeking out stories ideas and localizing them: this is what student press freedom looks like to The Post.
Student Press Freedom Day is a day to celebrate the work of student journalists and to celebrate their independence. The Post has been around for over 110 years and is editorially independent in Athens and at Ohio University.
The students in our newsroom have put their all into this paper on a daily basis while also working part-time jobs, going to class and participating in other extracurricular activities at Ohio University.
After the first classes of the day, the newsroom slowly begins to fill up with editors, reporters, photographers and designers. People come to write and edit stories, help design the tabloid, host staff meetings or just to kill some time in between classes.
Some parts of the day remain the same. We have daily staff meeting with section editors to determine that everything is ready to be published on the website the next day. On Wednesdays, we take content throughout the week and work until 2 a.m. making our 24-page tabloid that is printed and put out on displays around campus and the city each week.
While most students are at home studying or enjoying themselves at the bars, we are designing and editing each page for print. When explained to most people, they see it as a sort of sacrifice to work that late and miss out on time for something else. Some weeks it can be a pain, but most weeks we know how to make the work fun, and our staff has bonded from these late nights spent in our second home, the newsroom.
Whether they are there to edit, design or just provide moral support, those nights are times where we are all able to come together in one room and see our work come together all at once.
It’s hard work, but it’s something we all love and are proud of doing.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of The Post's executive editors: Editor-in-Chief Ellen Wagner and Digital Managing Editor Taylor Johnston. Post editorials are independent of the publication's news coverage.
